Arguments Against 9/11 Conspiracy

9/11 Conspiracy

I haven’t heard many concrete arguments against the conspiracy theories except those based on the belief that the government wouldn’t do it, and some emotional ones. The latter boils down to name-calling and accusing the conspiracy theorists of insensitivity, lack of compassion for the victims and their loved ones, lack of patriotism etc.

And then there are the debunkers, who mock and insult anyone who questions the official version of the 9/11 events. But they sound too rehearsed and contrived to be taken seriously. Speaking in three different languages (two of which I can understand), they sound almost verbatim recanting of some script, complete with identical props. If anything, their uniform ardor only serves to convince me more that 9/11 was an inside job.

Here is one that comes close to being an honest attempt at explaining the WTC7 collapse:

The real reason to discount the conspiracy theories about 9/11 is the fact that you can find crazy conspiracy theories about anything at all. After every school shooting, you can find people going around “proving” that it was a conspiracy by the anti-gun activists to whip up support for their cause. Conspiracy theories are all too readily put forward, and indeed dismissed. Even about 9/11, there are theories that are too farfetched to be taken seriously, which is why I tried to summarize what I understood as a coherent theory in the last article in this series.

I do believe, at this point, that there was a conspiracy for the motives I outlined in an earlier post. But I would like to present a few of possible reasons not to believe that 9/11 was an inside job.

In my view, the most compelling evidence for the conspiracy is the near perfect demolition of WTC7. But why did they not do a lousy job so that it would look like an uncontrolled, fire-induced collapse? It is clearly easier, I would think, to do a lousy demolition.

Conspiracy theorists insist that the planes looked grey and windowless, like military planes. To me, the video was too grainy to be sure. But if they were indeed military planes, why not go the extra mile and just paint the windows and airline logos?

Pentagon looked like missile hit. If the WTC hits were done with remote controlled military jets, why not use the same technology?

NIST said that they didn’t test for explosive residues because they didn’t expect any. If the rest of the report is a fabrication, why not just lie, and say that they did test for explosives and found none?

In the previous post, I mentioned that the conspiracy was an unqualified success. But, having been trained as an experimental physicist, I know that such conclusions are always biased. They are like a post-hoc hypothesis, which is guaranteed to look right. In other words, the fact that it looks like a perfectly executed conspiracy does not prove that it was one. It only proves that I had enough time to think about it and come up with something that fitted well.

Richard Clarke said something like the government is not competent enough to have done it. May be so. But it looks like they did some aspects of the conspiracy too well.